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Having studied at a Freudian Drive institute, Carl Jung came up very little in the classroom conversations about dreams or spirituality. Freud did not write as prolifically about dreams, and certainly his writings did not gain the wide spread influence that Jung has had on the dream world. Nonetheless, both forms of analysis emphasize the importance of the unconscious. For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. For Jung they may have come from the same source, but they were meant as portals to the soul.

In our day and age, I think it is fair to categorize Freud as an ego analysis and to characterize Jung and a spirit analysts. Again, I caution, you will probably find just as much similarities and differences between these two men, certainly at their earliest writings they had a mutual admiration society going between them. Sadly it turned into brotherly quarrels that were never resolved. Competition for leadership and control appears to have given emotional support to the two theories that went off simultaneously — albeit, in two directions.

We have covered frequently in my essays, that the default position of the ego appears to be tracking or paralleling the cultural notions of Civilization. The evolutions are woven together like vines in a jungle forest. . Therefore both cultural civilization and the individual ego tend to have the upper hand in the minds of people and diplomats alike. Our own internal worlds are governed by this powerful ruling ego. In the same way the governments of the world, and most recently the corporations of the world are also governed by the ego. As the ego claims to have the survival of the individual in its ‘mind’, we most often go along with the rules and regulations of civilization, be they imposed by Thomas Jefferson, of Joseph Stalin.

The very nature of grammar is a rule bound phenomena. The ego takes its shape and vision by the progressive adaptation to a linguistic competence. Language is how we make sense of the objective and the subjective, to both ourselves and to The Other. In addition to this matrix that we are building, we will add a ‘step-back-and view’ concept to our study of mind freeing activities. To understand the wider consciousness that the ego resides within, we have to cultivate a lens through which to view out internal behaviors and what motivates any particular behavior.

It is not unlike how we step back and view the position of the earth in the wider sea of the consciousness of space. The earth, like the ego, is not the center of the universe; although from a primitive perspective, one could easily see how it could be viewed as the center of everything. A vague un-truth at best, but one that sits well with humankind in our age of narcissism. Freud, Jung and Copernicus, all disturbed the sleep of the world using not only egoic thinking, but rather by using un-judged perspectives and passing them through a spectrum of questioning that rendered them scientifically plausible subjective events.

From consciousness was born the Unconscious remedy against following the Monarchs and dictators like sheep. Individuals began to de-cluster from the clan and establish themselves in a world that required very different defenses than they had come into this world with. A priority of individuation has taken grasp of humankind’s vision of its position in the every widening and deepening universe that we find ourselves with a minuscule idea of us as survivors — we get what we want if we are to survive, or we do not get what we want if we are to not-survive

The cosmology of consciousness is vast like space, it is a location not yet identified with a microscope; nonetheless, this difficult to explore region of the mind is made manifest if we allow ourselves to know something or someone in a language-less way. The ego opposes this as nonsensical. The ego does not want to give up it powerful position as ruler of the organism. It will yield only to the body, the other location other than the brain that carries knowledge in its cellular life.

I know what some of you will say, it is not science, or the data is too subjective to count. Well, that did not stop neither Freud nor Copernicus from making the discoveries that they made which propelled civilization in entirely different directions. Even Hysteria which was a prevalent neurotic disease in the 18 and the 19 hundreds, is now almost entirely eradicated simply because we evolved to understand the nature of the illness in such a way as that illness no longer carried and clout to exist….it disappeared from individual patients, got picked up by the media and eventually became a ridicule illness relegated to the minds of girls who refused to grow up. The global consciousness followed the local consciousness in this case. Ideas that once ruled became obsolete.

It is not that the ego and the earth are unimportant; rather it is that they are particularly relevant when paired up with the instinctual world that the psycho-somatic organism lives within. The eruption of knowledge does not arrive in the form of a thesis, any more that a relapsing gambler’s problems arrive in the form of a bet. The condition of the ego in the age of narcissism is to both elevate and condemn the ego at the same time. We live in fear and in awe of the power of the ego. But, we add caution because we have come to learn that its mission is no longer to take care of the wider organism that it lives within; the ego’s mission has become to save itself–at the expense of the organism that it was originally charged to protect. Hal, the computer in Space Odyssey 2001 is a good example of this in novel form. Once commissioned to protect the journey of the astronauts, it learned that it was more interested in preserving its power than in preserving the mission.

Lunacy and its Place in Psychoanalysis

With that said, I would like to move on to lunacy and it place in psychoanalysis. The father and the step-father of Analytic Thinking both were frightened by the lunacy that they seem to understand. About Freud, his reasoning and his work in Paris in the mid to late nineteenth century, were thought of as not proper subject matter for scientific study. Likewise about Carl Jung, his psychotic manifestations were seen by himself as dangerous to his reputation. It is as if the world and the scientific world in particular could not understand that the unconscious and its psychotic manifestations needed to be understood before it could be treated. Instead anyone that understood dreams or dynamics of non-linguistic affect were thought to be insane themselves. Only Shaman study dreams Freud was told as he was not accepted in the academy.

As I think about the same dynamics that I see in the consultation room, I am reminded that it feels crazy at times to understand the foreign. Much of my thinking when I am aiming to be with a patient comes to me as conflict and explanation. In that realm I become aware of a meta-consciousness (a feeling about a feeling); this clears the way for me to use projective identification not as a defense, but as treatment tool that hooks the patient where they are into feeling understood. These language-less regions require the analyst to bring the entire matrix to the table. What I am thinking and why I am thinking it and how did it arrive in my consciousness in the first place need to be present.

Without this added level of listening, an analytic session can be relegated to mere conversation. That may be somewhat helpful. However, the full impact of an analysis requires emotional communications from a region that knows nothing of language. The region that speaks to the organism in the form of pain and fear and anxiety and depressions that are only felt by the patient as bothersome sensations rather than the gold mind of knowledge they contain.

Bringing to the psychoanalytic chamber a graduated and progressive knowledge of the workings of the unconscious mind adds tremendous drive power to the analysis of the patient content. Pre-linguistic soothing or pre-linguistic frustrating are experienced by the patient as a corrective emotional experience. If anxiety always led to fear based decisions, perhaps soothing the fear at the unconscious level, might prevent repetitive behaviors that are in the patients egoic interest, but not in the interest of their progressive growth.

Without the cognitive organizing principle, the analyst is left to swim around the murky ooze with the patient. His only clues might be the grunting or the sighing indicating a frustration or a kind of long breath loosening the anxiety. These non-verbal signals alert the analyst to something that ought to have alerted the patient. Because the patient has spent so many years trying to rid himself/herself of their feelings, it is nearly impossible to ask the patient to befriend these sensations in order to try to understand they are trying to instruct.

Abandon Righteousness All Ye Who Enter Here:

I want to mention one final caution, or give one clue to the patient/doctor relationship that I have found indispensable. The black and the white, be it about segregation or integration, progressive and conservative ideologies, or kings and proletariat, requires one dimension before the intimacy can be accomplished necessary to work within the skull of a narcissistic condition:

Bring the non judgmental perspective into the room with you. Have it ready at first indication that it needs to be used. If we are afraid of the right or the wrong conclusion we are not in the correct paradigm. An analytic consultation aims to uncover the effective ways the patient needs to know to run life on all cylinders. The paradigm of ineffective vs. effective interventions is a more benign matrix to work within than is the notions of right or wrong..

The establishment of trust that the physician or therapist gets of himself/herself, becomes the back drop of hope against which the the patient will do all he can to help his ego sabotage the analysis. The ego knows that if the analysis is successful, it will be relegated to one voice among many instead of having the singular voice that speaks loud, speaks first and speaks english.

The transformations for symbol and sound into concepts and words travels up a chain of DNA like material. It picks up from the most primitive sensations and begins to evolve from an unknown thought to a known thought. At this level of integration the patient can begin to become a partner in the discoveries that he or she will need to further advance his libidinal goals….

Living in two centuries, it is natural to long for the centuries of antiquity. The 20th century with the folks still alive who remembered the later half of the 19th century is a nostalgia that coincides with being young and wide-eyed. It was a world where happiness was 99% anticipation. Too young for regrets, the world laid endlessly ahead like a blank canvas stretched clear to the horizon.

As Exit from Narcissism begins to take shape, I am allowing myself the freedom to say that I am writing a book.

The central theme of this manual involves the study of duality as it presents itself in the form of mental conflict. It is important to keep in mind that mental-conflict bears little resemblance to neurosis or any other illness based model of the mind.

The brain/body matrix manifests the mind and that mind can not be reduced to a singularity. The human mind is experientially and subjectively a duality which is inherently in conflict. Nothing reduces to one. Anything can be split in two. The idea of oneness is both an illusion and a delusion. It is an illusion because our perspective is a projection of our own perceived oneness. We tend to look out onto the universe from the singular perspective of “I”. It is a delusion because we want the comfort of oneness, and we are prone to accept reality only after we have washed it with the suds of our perspective.

Both the perspective of “I” and the perspective of our deeper awarenesses co-exist with little to no consciousness of each other. The acknowledgement of duality is only experienced when the deeper nature is deliberately called up from consciousness by the ego we call, “I”.

We wander between and among perspectives against a backdrop. Awareness of our duality is barely noticed. A deliberate command can access the deeper perspective; however, long before we come to understand our nature of duality we have been subject to its massive potential for internal conflict.

Issues of morality and issues with authority plagued us long before we became conscious of our unconscious mind. Becoming conscious of the unconscious provides us with further information than we would have with consciousness alone. The idea that all behavior is purposeful and guides our decisions our thoughts,and feelings is a result of the academic study of duality. Beginning with Freud and Jung as the fathers of psychology we have moved through over a century of deciphering meaning from word and symbols.

Whether our mind is a burning cauldron of creation or an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge, there is no denying the conflict that arises as a simple and crucial aspect of living. All of our thoughts and sensations have a meaning. This fact we have inherited through the scientific and literary history of civilizations.

How are we to make use of this psychodynamic fact of life?

The meaning of conflict and our growing academic understanding of conflict as a question begs for an answer. It is equal in scope to what previous generations asked about the nature of pain in a world created by and all-good God. Conflict stands out from a backdrop of comfort and alerts us to an internal or external condition that requires our attention. Conflict can appear in the form of anxiety and is registered as a sensation or feeling that erupts into consciousness. Because it does not necessarily rush into consciousness with words what we experience is a sense of urgency and to make it worst, it is an urgency that provides no direction.

Because it is experienced as an intrusion, it is in our human nature to want to destroy it. It is the classic killing of the messenger. What ever meaning was intended is lost in the battle that ensues between perspectives of the mind. The unconscious knowledge is not wanted because it threatens to disturb the sleep of the world. We ignore or deny the knowledge of the deeper consciousness to protect the singularity of the ego. The ego does not want to be wrong and does not want to be caught in a less than perfect light. Since the ego is the position of the “I”, it carries a great deal of weight toward preventing knowledge from the body to impact the singularity of the self.

The resolution of conflict becomes what life is about. Resolving questions that arise from conflict promotes success and effectiveness. Recognizing the conflict within and applying resolution is the process of adult developmental psychology. Living is the perpetual resolution of conflict. It is deliberate and is never over until life is over.

Our task is not simply to live it is to live well within the parameters created by needing to resolve all the aspects of organic life. It is through the resolution of perpetual conflict–(when we are through taking a breath, we need to automatically resolve taking the next breath), that this successful application becomes the source of joy and enthusiasm.

To access the depths that are within requires a conscious contact, a deliberate attempt to find the source of the body knowledge that holds the DNA of our antiquities. It may seem a contradiction to invite in a perspective that may cause a conflict, but it is the resolution, not the denial of conflict that creates room for joy and contentment and happiness to thrive.

Living well is only difficult when we insist on our singularity. When we become comfortable with conflict as an aspect of the mind that will not go away, we can begin to understand the requirements necessary to govern ourselves. It is this understanding that psychoanalysis aims for. Having arrived at concluding a peace with inner conflict we will have achieved a level of adult development that we call maturity.

Le Coeur a ses raison que la raison ne connais pas–the heart has its reasons that the reason can not know.

It sounds like ancient history to some of us who have heard that phase many times. But the truth is this: the heart and the mind do not communicate, in fact they hardly know of each others existence. It is like having a twin across the world that you never knew you had.

Discovering where and how the heart functions in the arena of mental health and in the arena of psychoanalysis specifically, is a job well worth undertaking. Psychoanalysts are among the best trained people to take on this issue. We are not the only people who know about this human dynamic, but we are among the top few disciplines that even consider the subjective to be scientifically understandable.

Psychoanalysis has as its primarily mission the uncovering of unknown, knowns. We specialize in following thought to where the thoughts originate both in the body and in the mind/brain matrix. Eastern philosophies are also greatly equipped to search out the internal mechanisms that operate when we create a thought, and act on it. This very fact begins to encourage the future. Thoughts, well before they become action, inform and encourage the future. We are always at the cutting edge of our extension into life.

Thoughts and subsequent decisions are many times autonomically generated. Like the other autonomic systems of the body, we have little consciousness of the steps that our bodies take to keep us alive. The mind and the body function as one unit with a specific mission to keep ourselves from premature death and self-destruction.

However, if as adults we are formulating thoughts that have as their antecedent unconscious history, we may become at the mercy of exactly the very “thing” that we were wanting to avoid. Humans are not constructed by blue-print the way computers are constructed. We evolved more in the manner that a jungle evolves. Tangled and snarled our neuro-pathways twist and curve to form connections with other aspects of the body. The heart, as the most basic example of this fact, had to carve out its connection to the brain while still a young fetus. Looking at this we might thinks that it should be time that we start understanding the intelligence of the heart.

We understand the intelligence of the brain, not very well yet, but certainly more than the neurology of Freud’s time understood. The intelligence of the heart however is still greatly under studied. I am sure that are many reasons for this, not the least of which is sciences own peculiar way of deciding what is appropriate content for its examination. At the turn of the 20th century, dream analysis was considered content appropriate for gypsies and shamans. Freud had much difficulty being accepted in the scientific community,

When a piece of our knowledge is heart-felt, we experience that knowledge with a sensation that is akin to wisdom. The aha—aha moment, the slight tingle up and down the spine or the appearance of goose-bumps on your arms, these are indications that your body is registering a feeling or thought. The ego on the other hand usually says something like, “Oh yea, I knew that”.

Learning to access heart-felt knowledge requires discipline in much the same way that exercising the body requires discipline, or in the way that meditation requires us to be actively deliberate about the process.

Also, because we are so identified with our thoughts, we find it hard to dismantle a thought we have been having over and over again for nearly a life time in some instances. The further back in time that we can remember thinking a certain way indicates the extent to which the body and the mind will regress to maintain a hold on a thought. We do not want to know if something that we think is not true. In other words, the mind (ego) will fight the heart.

If the mind (ego) maintains a steady diet of winning, the heart will eventually “lose-heart” and give up trying to find the most effective way of experiencing our well-being. In time accessing the heart is not even a consideration as we have become hostage to our mental ruminations leaving little room for the instincts to run and play in a creative way. Creativity, not necessarily fine-art, is the most effective measure of our vitality. And, out vitality is a measure of our drive, our desires. To exist with no heart-felt way to meet our dreams is to have given up on the basic human instincts. We have abandoned our deep, richer selves to a corporate take over by the ego.

Heart-felt solutions are not difficult positions to take. But heart-felt solutions will always be subject to the ego’s destructive nature. If our anger is experienced as ineffective, it will stay in the body and attach itself to some psycho-semiautomatic condition.

As we move forward in an analysis, we move inward as well as forward. In many ways the internal universe is as ever expanding as the external universe; and as such it will always have a new outlook, a fresh take on the matter if we can learn to allow access to our hearts in the same manner that we have allowed access to our egos.

One might ask, Are not all emotions heart felt? Maybe? But I have a specific reason to be tapping the emotions in relation to the heart. We hardly stop to think of emotions and heart as being an integrated aspect of nature. Our spontaneous capacity for joy or sorrow, laughter or tears; or our wonder at the beauty or the horrors of life — these are the stuff that elevate our consciousness or dismantle our well-being. I am inclined to believe that the information supplied by the heart and the body is significantly different from the information supplied by the mind and the brain.

Emotions have a great deal in common with feelings. They both erupt from the body rather than erupt from the mind, and as such they are quicker on the draw. They avalanche us, they seemingly attack us from the outside. We hardly know from where they come and there is no organ in the body that operates like the brain does, so we are left with the notion of feeling and emotion happen to us.

We are, as a science, certain that emotions inform us, but unlike our thoughts, our feelings and emotions register as subjective experience rather than as objective data. If I were to hold up a picture of a table you would not have an passioned response. But let’s say that I were to hold up a picture of a forest on fire with several children seemingly trapped, you might have a visceral response. One is a simple objective fact the other is charged with emotion.

We intuitively know the distinction between an objective thought and an impassioned emotion. The most important function of a feeling is to inform the body of a condition that needs to be paid attention to…hunger, exhaustion, pain, these we recognize as sensations that encourage us to think about and to act in accordance with both the informed feeling and subsequently the informed thought.

Another major difference between a thought and a feeling is that the feeling rises to consciousness with no help from our mind. Emotions tend to be independent and they rise out of experience as a sensation. They are not formulated in language. They exist as a system of the body that is void of language oriented thoughts.

In Western tradition, the heart felt instincts from which emotions and feelings arise are not cultivated as a product of much value. We are trained to be rational. We have even excluded the study of the subjective from scientific evaluation. It is relegated to fringe disciplines most associated with self-help and new-age phenomena. This is changing as the neuro sciences are breaking new sound barriers in the mind/body matrix.

It makes more sense now than ever to be re-awakening the foundational knowledge that Freud brought to the western hemisphere of civilization. The neurology of his time over one hundred years ago reads like hieroglyphics. But Freud’s metaphors of neurology are today’s cutting edge science.

The heart of the matter has never been more important than it is right now. Not only is our entire neural history carried in our hearts and minds, but our ancestral knowledge garnered from our parentage and eons back from that is also carried in our hearts and minds.

The heart of the matter, as I see it, resides in the knowledge that as an organism we possess a divided mind. It is made up of instinct and ego, conscious and unconscious as well as thoughts and feelings, hormones and dendrites, mucus and sinew, with neuro-circutry connected in such a way that it operates more organically like a jungle than it does like a computer.

If the metaphor carries through, the rational thought runs like a computer, because it is what developed the computer. The heart of the matter runs more like a jungle where instinct acts to help us survive and grow at the microcosm and the macrocosm of it; but it does not use language to convey its information to us. It uses subjective sensation as the unit of communication. A bird call, if you will. Like in the jungle the bird call can be heard by all species, the proximity of the tiger is alerted by a bird call.

We need to locate within us the capacity to hear the bird call and to interpret it for its intended meaning. We have no intention of throwing away the lap-top, but if I am walking through a jungle, I would like to think that the call of the wild is as easily readable as the english characters in this computer screen.

The heart of the matter has information as crucial to our survival as is the stuff of the manifested mind….

The concept of self-love seems to be under perpetual attack, from the right, the left, and the center. It seems that self-love, narcissism and selfishness or selflessness are all concepts that manage to disguise the authentic meaning of self love. For me I find it easier to lump all aspects of self-love under the umbrella of managing ones life.

Management is an executive function that has come primarily under the influence of the ego, that aspect of ourselves that we generally think of when we call ourselves by our first name. Repeat to yourself the following: “My Ego’s name is___(Al)______________.” That give you a clear sense, and a sense that you can continue to clarify anytime you decide that it is necessary to check in with yourself to make sure that you are on the track for knowing what you want and what you want to do in life. Without that compass to due north we are, indeed lost in a sea of consciousness.

The management of self-love will never be satisfying if it emits exclusively from the ego. Therefore it is of primary importance to we seekers that we know how to subjectively look within for data and information that comes from the other aspects of our organism other than the left-brain ego. For starters the best way to access our more primal instincts is to simply stop as much thinking in english as we can, calm our bodies by taking simply a few deep breaths, to ensure that we are preparing ourselves for the transition to the search within instead of the objective and perpetual scanning of all that is outside of us. Then calmly ask yourself this question.

If I could have anything and everything that I wanted what would that be? If I were able to permit no resistances to

my most heartfelt desires what would that look like?

There has to be no moral, no religious, no social or civilized judgements about your most inner and most personal wants. This simple exercise in Letting-Go of Fear requires abject honesty with yourself and perhaps with your analyst, but with no one else, not your beloved partner, not your priest or minister….this is entirely a personal inventory that will help to guide you toward finding the star that you want to hitch a ride from. Keep in mind we are lost in

a sea of consciousness until we know our true north.

Self-Love is a state of human affairs where by we understand that the primal objective of life is to successfully survive. Self-love begins with an ability to access our survival instincts. These instincts however are hidden under the shadow of the ego and getting to these instincts means that we have to be prepared to have a discussion with the aspect of us that is the Ego. The Ego, as chief executive of the human organism, will not relinquish power readily. So, you have to be prepared to go into the bosses office and be entirely straight, entirely honest with what you want for yourself and you must be able to fight off

the powerful intimidating and over-whelming feelings that the Ego will erect as a defense against you wanting to consult the wider sea of consciousness.

Once in the presence of our deeper instincts rather than solely in the presence of the Ego, we can look at forgiveness, compassion we can see that Love is an action that we take, not a thing we have. We can embrace all aspects of what we want because what we want is as good for ourselves as it is good for people and critters around us. Narrow in on the positive feelings that would erupt if you were living exactly the way you would like to live your life. And begin

to believe that you can and will have what you want once you know how to handle the pressures and the stresses of your own ego.

All conflict in life is within the ego. The metaphor that I have been using about ego induced conflict is this: “You are going to a horse race with only two horses racing. You decide to bet $1000 on one horse and to hedge your bet you bet $1000 on the other horse.” That is the consequence of winning a battle within the ego…there can be no winner and no looser.

Quiet the mind for a moment, let yourself access anything and everything that you want and place no restrictions whatsoever on that desire….open your eyes and go on living as if nothing happened.

The Self as we know ourselves consists of an idea of who we are. This idea of who we are is not who we are, at least it is not the entirety of who we are. The soul of humankind is well hidden, as if eclipsed by the Ego. Although it is present at all times, it if far easier to see the idea of ourselves which we have invented through the years than it is to see the spirit that connects us with all other sentient beings.

The idea that we are alone is an idea that stems from the Ego. It comes into belief because as we grow to experience the world we perceive, wrongly that we are separate from all else that we see. This feeling of separation appears to be the reality of the human condition; but in fact it is a rather elaborate distortion that clamps onto our consciousness and prevents us from seeing the most elaborate miracle of life–that we are all connected in a oneness, that we are all a member of the stuff that the universe is made of. We are not separate, we are not only witnesses to the universe, we are the universe.

This idea that we are one with the universe does not reconcile with the idea of the ego that it is a separate condition and as such must protect itself from connections with other sentient beings. In fact this separation is the source of fear.

In this essay i would like to demonstrate that the closer we become to the nature of our spirit, the less we need the ambitions of the ego. By not needing the ambitions of the ego we become free to experience the wonders of the universe from within rather experiencing the world as if it was entirely outside of us.

This slight shift in perception organizes our minds in such a manner that what is seen is experienced as part of the oneness of the universe. The need for fear is lessened and the condition of the spirit takes over where the self-creation of our ego was previously in total control.

It may seem strange to some readers that the act of writing which is a product of the ego can lend itself to accessing the soul or the spirit hidden in the shadow of the ego. But writing being just another form of thought production has the capacity to view the internal spirit as well as the external world. In part this is the case because writing can become an automatic condition. Some writers have declared that their writing has come to them in the form of a dictation. They might say that it feels as if the words were be dictated and the hand is simply taking dictation.

In this form of automatic writing, the ego has little to do with what is being produced. As such the material that that emits from the process is one in which the ego has had little or no contact with its content. When writers speak of this kind of automatic writing they frequently consider that an entity outside of them is communicating. I do not agree with this perception.

The dictation comes from within as if it were coming from the ego, but the source of the dictation is from spirit not from ego. At first it may seem to the writer that the words are not so different than when writing from the ego, but in time a subtle difference occurs and the language become more precise, the words are less deliberate and the product can seem to the author as if it were written by someone else. In fact in rereading what is written, it can feel to the author as if he were reading this for the first time. The uncanny feeling of thinking that the material has come from another source can be one of the first indications that this kind of automatic writing is taking place and that the ego has been temporarily displaced.

In these situation there appears to be no censor. There is no judgement taking place that demands of the author that he/she change anything. Instead the words keep coming and the pages fill themselves up with words and phrases that eventually concludes in a finished product that is unrecognizable to the ego, but nonetheless feels very familiar.

In this way, writing can act as a bridge to the spirit, to that knowledge that is built into the very fabric of being. There is no need to attempt to do away with the ego as if it were a bad energy. The ego has its place in our individual worlds and is the source of important human dimensions such as language. The ego because of its central place in our psyche maintains a default position. In other words we do not need to deliberately invite in the ego. It is there as a consequence of our birth and our DNA.

The spirit on the other hand, can only become visible to us when we intentionally invite it in. Consider the Spirit as that which function between you and another sentient being, be that another human, an angel, a god or your dog or cat. The Spirit is the dynamic that exist between you and the other. It is invisible tissue in the same way that a thought has no matter and a feeling has no matter, but we nonetheless experience thoughts because there is “spirit” that connects that thought to you in some permanent manner.

Sea-Change

We are not always ready for a sea change. We are not always ready to embrace and allow progressive thinking. We tend to want to hang on to our ideas as if the were precious. Sometimes we hang onto our ideals with the same tenacity that we use to hang on to a person,or things, or a drug.

Life has a way of presenting itself in such a manner that we believe that the act that just happened in front of me is the cause for my emotion. That simply is not the case. All kind of terrible events happen to us or in front of our eyes. But our reaction to these random events do not cause us to have an emotion. Our emotion colors how we see the act or how we perceive the person in front of us.

The more powerful our reaction is to an event gives that event its significance its meaning and it value in our lives.

I have experienced several se-changes in my life. I want to say a few words about the most recent which is still resonating with me today.

When Francis was elected to the thrown in Rome, I had a violent, somewhat vicious and totally uninformed reaction to him. One more pompous man dressed in a white dress, covered in gold lame, accessorized in crimson red and wearing Prada shoes…parading around dispensing judgements that were in fact condemnations to hell.

I have to apologize to Francis. My partner was very stern when he told me I was spouting out language that had no bearing on the man himself. I was prepared to condemn him as I has felt condemned by the church.

I was wrong, or at least I now have hope that perhaps I was wrong. His tone and his peace manner imparted in me a serenity and formed a cavern in my heart that left room for reconciliation, forgiveness. I watched with tears as this humble man moved a high liturgy from inside the basilica, adorned in ancient marble and gold and paintings by Michelangelo, to a juvenile detention center in Rome where he proceeded to wash the feet of 12 inmates instead of washing the feet of twelve old Cardinals.

I listened in disbelief when he made poverty into a global issue that we in all nations needed to come to a better understanding of. I read his encyclicals where he instructed his bishops and priests to support civil unions for Gay couples, advocating that we be afforded all the rights and legalities that belong to marriage. He asked that we might keep the sacrament of marriage as unique to the partnership between man and woman, because it was a venerable tradition.

My decades of resentment toward the Catholic church has created a cold spot in my heart, one that I was no longer aware of. But when Francis with his insistence on peace and poverty and humility entered into my consciousness, I had an immediate desire to emulate that humble nature that smiled out of what looked like a man very much at peace with himself….

Who knows, he might be exactly what the world needs at this point in time….I have no need to forgive the church for the insanities of the Spanish inquisition, nor can I forgive yet the insane position that condoms would increase the spread of AIDS.

But if I let myself be willing to hear what he says without first judging him, I think I will have done myself a great favor…..